BotOff (Team 5)

Rationale & Inspiration

Picture yourself in the New Year's - you've just had a great holiday season, maybe with lots of great food, and you're now thinking about your New Year's resolutions. You decide to resolve to increase your physical activity, but in the back of your mind you know you probably won't meet the goal - you've been resolving to do this very thing every year without success. Now it's time to get your BotOff! This little robot will help you reach your goal - its goal in life is to make you work for your screen time.

What it does

You willingly put your phone into the robot's locker box and it runs away from you. Now the only way to unlock it is to reach the activity goal you set for yourself. So if you have a pedometer or smartwatch, and say we set the threshold to be 10 000 steps or 300 calories, you would be able to unlock the robot and use your phone only when you've reached this threshold. Or you can accomplish your goal by chasing after it.

How we built it

Arduino is our choice of micro controller. A bluetooth shield is used by the robot to pull pedometer data. Ultrasonic sensors are used to make sure that the robot does not bump into any obstacles (and possibly destruct itself).

Challenges we ran into

Originally, our plan was to develop a system that would incentivize kids/teenagers to become more active and away from screens, but our robot seems to be more suitable and useful to grown-ups since they are more mature to know what they want in life. > Could not get everything communicating through wireless to remove wifi - used bluetooth instead > Was going to use a Pebble watch, but it's too complex to be implemented within 36 hours - used pedometer instead > Makebot library very buggy - tapped into pin assignments and cycled our own code > Half of our teammates are complete beginners...

Accomplishments that we are proud of

> Teamwork
> Bluetooth basic understanding

What we learned

> Be flexible and creative; when things don't work, try another method. Work around the idea/goal and not around the design. 
> The 2 beginners in our team acquired basic knowledge, a little bit of know-how about Arduinos and circuit-construction.
> The 2 Engineering Science students practiced a field get were less familiar with, becoming more rounded with robotics.

What's next for BotOff

> Add a variety of physical activity-related measurements with associated threshold requirements, such as length of time spend being active and level of physical activity (i.e., light moderate, or vigorous activity)
> Integrate smart variables
> Apply this system to other similar contexts (e.g., counts shots for hockey, soccer)